“Hybrid is the future, it’s faster to develop, more efficient and has no real downside or impact”

I hate bloated applications as much as anyone, but they really do not have much incentive to switch away from this since Slack is already doing so well. If people are using it despite the bloat and availability of faster alternatives you can't really fault them for it.

#electron

Can't really blame them when every library imports is-number.js, is-regex.js, improved_for-loop.js and other_random_shit.js

@RememberMe well they could still be doing better. Slack is a useful service, but the app is complete shit. It’s extremely buggy, slow and glitchy.

I have to believe they are getting a shit tonne of support issues and tickets from that. Yes they might be worth a lot of money now, but how much would they be worth if it cost a lot less to maintain and bug fix it.

Literally facing this same argument with my management. Forcing us to make countless hacks and workarounds because we’ve no time. We’ve no time because we are debugging customer issues constantly.

Meanwhile it's 2106

@practiseSafeHex and maybe Slack would never have reached where it is today (value wise) without their slow-hacky-mess approach. I think they were just waiting for the IPO to give them that value boost and now they can go back and do stuff properly to staunch all the maintenance bleeding (or heck maybe even a rewrite, since bad optimization is probably the #1 downside). Which I think is a decent approach, getting yourself established is pretty important, works as long as you generate enough value.

Or not, and they bleed money, like you said. Possible. I really don't know. Just speculating.

About your case, I agree that maintenance and support for a bad, hurriedly made service is an absolute nightmare and probably loses more money in the long run, but unless you're in a startup that's trying to establish themselves it's not the same thing as what Slack is doing. Your case sounds more like management being short-sighted (my commiserations, btw).

If you have more dependencies than classes in your code, you're doing it wrong!

@practiseSafeHex what are you doing with Slack if its extrememly buggy and slow for you? Would really want to know, since I never had issues with it.

Mattermost on other side was complete trash and perfectly fits your description. Can give them some "slack", since they're open source though.

I'm not a JS dev at all, but does a JS 'linker' exist ?

Because in C/C++ having thousands of dependencies is not really an issue **at run-time** since the linker would just not put unused functions in the binary.

So, could cutting all the unused code automagically make electron apps like slack run faster ? Does a solution like this already exist ?

@MagicSowap it sorta does exist. When npm(yarn kr whatever) builds a project one does have control over unused libs and stuff. The issue is that some of these dependencies are sooo deeply nested that we get a lot of shit that is not needed.
In UI projects everything pretty much gets compiled into a single file.

Still an approach that I really dislike, dependency hell is a thing although it can be managed for the most part.

@myss I’m not an advanced slack user by any standard. Just use it very frequently for messages ... and /giphy of course.

One of my major problems (running on a brand new high spec Mac) is very regularly when I close the lid and reopen. Everything else is fine, but nothing in slack responds to clicks. Have to constantly kill and reopen it all day

Yknow, only one of those packages needs to be compromised and slack security goes kaputt

@myss Came in this morning, one of my workspaces won't load. Other has full slack content and buttons, other is entirely blank white, no loading spinner, no messages, no rendering, no nothing. Killed and re-opened yet again

and I feel bad for adding GSON to my maven

Yes but we'd all agree that compared to the bloat we see in other applications, slack is actually pretty efficient and stable... I personally prefer regular updates and a lot of dependencies rather than outdated and unstable junk without dependencies

@frickerg dude it’s crashing and screwing up on nearly a daily basis on a brand new Mac for me. I lost count of how many times it just stops responding to input entirely.

It’s an instant messaging client. This amount of bloat is completely ridiculous and unnecessary

@practiseSafeHex okay we might have a different experience then, mine has never crashed ever 🤔 But the bloat is due to their plugin support if I'm not mistaken

@frickerg the bloat is due to it being an electron, cross platform app that needs a couple hundred dependencies just to turn on. We only have like 2 plugins running on ours. One of my workspaces was just completely white again today and had to force restart

@practiseSafeHex yeah I know it's an electron app I've worked with electron too but had only a few dependencies. Being electron does not make it bloated by design.

2065 opportunities to inject malicious code...

I find it baffling that there aren't more major security incidents in JS apps. All it takes is for one package dev to go rogue and obfuscate the vulnerability well enough that it goes unnoticed for a week.